Firebird, a US-based AI cloud company, opened what NVIDIA calls the CIS region’s largest AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia on Saturday. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended, alongside Kazakhstan’s deputy prime minister Zhaslan Madiyev and David Allen, the US chargé d’affaires in Armenia.
That guest list is the story. A US company opened a facility in a country inside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, with an American diplomat and a Kazakh minister watching.
The licence is the load-bearing fact
None of this happens without export approval. Firebird secured a US export licence in November 2025, the regulatory step that allowed advanced NVIDIA hardware into Armenia at all.
The politics were made explicit in February. Firebird and the US government jointly announced Phase 2 at a Yerevan press conference during Vice President JD Vance’s visit, scaling the project to $4 billion and roughly 50,000 GPUs with licensing for a further 41,000 NVIDIA GB300 units.
